polar opposition

American  

noun

Linguistics.

1. the relation between a pair of antonyms that denote relatively higher and lower degrees of a quality with respect to an explicit or implicit norm rather than absolute values, as the relation between tall and short or light and dark, but not between true and false.

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Example Sentences

Next door, Idaho presents a polar opposition to Oregon.

From The Guardian • Apr. 13, 2016

But even that polar opposition reflects a certain parallelism: These movies both reflect the strengths and limitations of American indie cinema in the age of the Great Television Conquest.

From Salon • Feb. 26, 2015

No; it was a faculty in polar opposition to the true faculty of conversation.

From The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 2 by Japp, Alexander H. (Alexander Hay)

The ideas 'unclean' and 'holy' seem to us to stand in polar opposition to one another, but it was not so with the Semites.

From Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 The Evolution of Modesty; The Phenomena of Sexual Periodicity; Auto-Erotism by Ellis, Havelock

The sense of hearing and that of seeing stand in polar opposition, and thus a natural scale offers itself by which we may rank and arrange our artists.

From An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning's Poetry by Corson, Hiram